[Illustration: WHERE THE GOLD COMES FROM. F. MARRYAT DEL^{T}] [Illustration: MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS OR RECOLLECTIONS OF A BURNT JOURNAL] BY.FRANK.MARRYAT. AUTHOR OF “BORNEO AND THE EASTERN ARCHIPELAGO.” WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 1855. LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. PREFACE. Nothing that I can say here will blind the reader to the deficiency of these pages; they are in truth, as their title expresses, the recollections of a “Journal burnt,” and I present here but an outline of what I have seen or heard during three years of my life; and if I am wanting in figures and statistics and anything of weight as regards the country written of, it is certainly because I recalled this Journal unexpectedly, and far from the scenes it once depicted. I may have remembered too little, but that is preferable to remembering too much. I have tried to confine myself to what is most pleasant, and it may be that a rambling truthful story is the best, if to make the work elaborate one must have recourse to fiction. It is right that a man should submit anything he does modestly, yet for all that a preface need not be an apology; for I look on a tale written as a tale told, with this advantage to the reader, that if the tale written please him not, he can close the book and have done with it. I am no button-holder, and would rather, sir, that you would desert me at my second chapter, than that you should wade wearily through this volume, and then, because we do not suit each other, say that I have bored you. In these days, when new discoveries of Nature’s gifts, and increased facilities of communication with them invite man to roam, any record of travel should possess some interest for the adventurous. I have proved to myself, what these pages may not show, that a man with health may plant himself in any country in the world, and by the exercise of those reasonable faculties that are denied to few, may there live well and happily. It is nothing, perhaps, to state this for a fact, but I would have each emigrant hug it to his breast as a warm hope that will uphold him in the hours of adversity and trial that will meet him in the path he pioneers for himself in a new country.